The Isenheim Crucifixion

Description

Little survives of the output of Matthias Grunewald beyond a handful of altarpieces, and none of them approach the violence of this Isenheim Crucifixion reproduction. Where his other panels often soften suffering into something devotional and composed, this one refuses to look away from decay, and that refusal is what has kept it famous for five centuries.

About Isenheim Crucifixion Reproduction

Painted between 1512 and 1516 for the hospital chapel of the Monastery of St. Anthony at Isenheim, the panel shows the view the sick would have faced when the great polyptych altarpiece stood closed. Christ hangs dead on a cross built from unplaned, splintered wood, his body pulled downward by its own weight, the sky behind him gone the color of old bruise. His flesh is grey green and studded with sores, a deliberate echo of the ergotism and skin disease that filled the beds of the monastery hospital, so that a dying patient could look up and recognize his own body in the body of the Saviour. To the right the Virgin Mary collapses into the arms of John the Evangelist while Mary Magdalene kneels below with her hands locked in prayer. To the left John the Baptist stands apart, pointing at the dying figure with a long bony finger, an open book in his other hand and a small lamb bearing a cross at his feet.

The raw colour and the exaggerated anatomy place this among the most intense crucifixion images to come out of Northern European art, a famous painting precisely because it will not let its subject stay beautiful. Grunewald built the picture in thin, overlapping layers of oil and tempera, so the wounds on the skin of Christ read as something closer to disease than to ornament, and the darkness behind the cross has almost no incident in it at all, just a slow fall from brown to black.

The hand-painted reproduction

Our reproduction is painted by hand, not printed, and the process follows the logic of the original surface rather than copying it from a flat scan. An artist working in oil on canvas builds the mottled flesh of Christ in the same layered manner, laying grey and green and ochre over one another until the wounds sit under the skin rather than on top of it. The palette is matched passage by passage against the original panel, from the near black of the sky to the pale, grief-worn faces of the mourning figures, and the brush leaves the canvas with a surface you can read with raking light, the kind of texture a printed sheet simply cannot hold. This oil painting reproduction is made to order, so the scale of the altarpiece can be brought down, or up, to suit the wall it will hang on.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade canvas, not printed
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your space
• Arrives gallery-ready for display
• Includes a certificate of authenticity
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country